Thanks to Rosemary McLeod (Tuesday, 2 Feb) for describing a common reliance on social media to attempt to find meaning, “as if only by filming it does it make it real.”

This reliance on media predates the likes of mobile phones, though. Politics has been contested by TV for a long time, now. Despite many local issue or political rallies which represent real people expressing real feelings and ideas during a campaign, Winston Peters once observed, ‘if it wasn’t on TV, it didn’t happen’.

Why have so many been so fearful of the real for so long? The fruits of submerged anxieties in denial can be seen openly in the USA today with the emergence, not really of a ‘populist’, but of a sociopath of dangerous proportions in the person of Donald Trump. In this country with a more reserved personality we have seen the same denial in the psychopathic-like manipulation of one John Key. Now predictably PM Bill English says he will ‘go slow’ on climate change and try not to not antagonize Trump. How long can we hide?